UE NEWS Updates

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has released a video featuring the voices of striking UE members in Erie, PA.

On June 26, North Carolina Public Service Workers of UE Local 150 kicked off their summer organizing blitz in honor and remembrance of founding organizer of Local 150 and leader of the Black workers’ movement in the South, Saladin Muhammad. Members from four of UE’s newly organized graduate worker locals traveled to North Carolina to join the blitz and support Local 150’s efforts. Graduate workers from the University of Minnesota, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Northwestern worked with Local 150 rank-and-file members and staff throughout the week to have conversations with workers about their conditions and the importance of building a strong union.

On Wabtec’s second-quarter earnings call with investors yesterday, the company was forced to address the ongoing strike by members of UE Locals 506 and 618 at the company’s locomotive plant in Erie, PA. Chief Financial Officer John Olin admitted that “margins were down a little bit more than we expected. The key driver of that … was the inefficiencies we're experiencing at our facility in Erie behind the strike.”

For about two hours on Thursday, July 6, a busload of strikers from Wabtec’s Erie locomotive plant, joined by hundreds of supporters, chanted, sang and rallied outside Wabtec’s corporate headquarters. Fourteen hundred members of UE Locals 506 and 618 have been on strike since Thursday, June 22, when they voted down Wabtec’s last, best and final offer by a wide margin.